Eye On Performance: A Load Of Stress
By Jack Shirazi & Kirk Pepperdine
2004-01-22
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If it were only that easy...
Now, what about handling extended interactions, where one request depends on the results of the previous one? What about handling cookies? Cookies are essential for many session-oriented J2EE systems. How about varying data input? What if your J2EE application client needs to process some JavaScript in order to proceed with the next communication? After you've collected the response time data, how are you going to analyze it? What about other types of monitoring, such as CPU time, network utilization, heap size, paging activity, or database activity?
It's features like these and others, such as tools to facilitate recording of browser sessions and turning them into test scripts, that differentiate the high-end load testing tools from the basic ones. How do you choose the right tool for you? Of course, this depends on your needs, your schedule, and your budget. Most importantly, you need to use a tool that can correctly simulate the client browser features that your application requires. Once the basic features are in place, you can then consider the productivity of the tools. Generally, the more analysis tools that are included, and the more different types of performance data you can record, the more productive you can be -- and the more you are likely to pay. The top-end load testers can simulate multiple browsers, integrate with most application servers, gather performance data from multiple server hosts including operating system, JVM and database statistics, and generate datasets that can be analyzed afterwards using sophisticated analysis tools. On the other hand, the low-end load testers are free. In these budget-constrained days, there's a lot to be said for "free."
Figure 1 illustrates Apache JMeter, one of the free load testers, showing an automatically recorded script.
Figure 1. JMeter showing an automatically recorded script
First published by IBM developerWorks
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